Trans Labrador Highway Part 2

Sunday

When I stepped out of my tent early in the morning it was drizzling again with a damp fog that made everything feel claustrophobic. The road was out of sight and silent, all I could see were the short pine trees and soft lichens and mosses surrounding my campsite. I felt like I was truly in the middle of nowhere, without another soul anywhere nearby. After standing in awe of my surroundings for a while I hopped back on the bike and rode on through the increasing rain, past the massive Fermont iron mine, and across the border into Labrador. I didn’t feel like walking around Lab City in the pouring rain so I stopped just long enough for breakfast at the Two Seasons Inn, and to pick up a free emergency satellite phone that the province gives to people travelling on the Trans-Labrador Highway. Just outside of town I turned onto the first leg of the TLH, an all paved ride through the wild Taiga to Churchill Falls, two hundred and fifty kilometers away.

After a few hours I rolled into Churchill Falls and started looking for the giant municipal building that houses the hotel, restaurant, grocery store, post office, swimming pool, and school. It wasn't hard to find, especially when I saw four other BMW GS’s parked out front. The riders were headed in the other direction, so we swapped stories about the road conditions ahead. They even gave me a free gas can for the three-hundred mile stretch of wilderness that I was planning on tackling the next day!

As I was talking to these guys I met two others who were heading in my direction. Dave and Dave were riding a couple of old BMW air-cooled bikes, and we agreed to ride together for the three hundred kilometer trip to Goose Bay/Happy Valley. It kept raining off and on and we made it safely through the short, but very loose and sketchy section of gravel on this part of the route. Just after finding the pavement again we hit a couple of heavy thunderstorms that tried to blow us off the road. Once those passed the sky got lighter and it looked like it might be smooth sailing all the way into Goose Bay, but as soon as I relaxed the shit started to hit the fan. My overheating light came on. “Well, fuck …” I pulled over immediately and sat there for a second thinking about how screwed I might be. Dave and Dave pulled up and we tried to figure out what might be wrong. Fluid levels were all good, the cylinder didn't feel too hot, nothing looked broken or disconnected, and nothing felt or sounded weird. I rode a couple more minutes down the road and the light came right back on. “Fuck me!” I pulled over again and we tried harder to diagnose the problem. We pulled off the seat and panels, checked fluids, unplugged things, plugged them back in, checked fuses… nothing seemed to be wrong. With no mechanical evidence for overheating I started to think it was a problem with a computer, not the engine. Since we were still a hundred miles from anything resembling civilization, it was cold and raining, and the road had next to no traffic, I made the decision to keep riding a little further. Being the not-so-mechanically-inclined person that I am, I made the mistake of thinking that things would probably turn out alright. I rode another ten minutes with the light on and pulled over to quickly check fluids and how hot the cylinder felt. I held my hand around it for several seconds and it didn't feel hot at all, so I reassured myself that it was just a computer problem. Stupid, stupid, stupid…

Just as the endorphins were beginning to subside and I thought I was in the clear my bike started to lose a little power going up hills. Then something below the handlebars started rattling when I rotated the throttle to between half and three-quarters of fully open. Then suddenly it started rapidly losing power and I hit the kill switch. Now when we tore it apart the coolant overflow tank was totally empty and something was clearly very wrong. It was time to flag down a truck and get a ride into town. Fortunately it had died just a few kilometers outside of Goose Bay and a friendly guy with his family stopped to give me a ride on their way back from a weekend out at their camp. The only hitch was that they didn't have any ramps to get my bike into the back of their truck. We started flagging down everybody passing through asking for ramps, but nobody had them. One truck that stopped happened to be a couple of Vermonters who know someone I know from work. They stayed to help and we joked at how random it was for us to have met up there. At this point the sun was starting to set and things were looking desperate. Finally, a truck full of guys working on a hydroelectric project nearby pulled over and brought us a ladder. Not the best ramp but it would have to do. By then there were probably eight of us and we all worked to muscle the four hundred and fifty pound bike into the back of the truck. Finally it was in and strapped down so we started making our way into town.

We dropped of my bike at an awesome shop called Frenchie’s, and bumped into the owner who helped us find a hotel room for the night. I rode around in the back of his pickup trying to find any hotel in town with some vacancy. It turns out just about every room in Goose Bay is full all the time now because of the Muskrat Falls Dam project. All of the construction workers live in the hotels on their days off so finding a room at 9 pm is almost impossible. We ended up squeezing into the last room available at Hotel North Two. The room was crazy expensive, even when it was split three ways. I had heard good things about the Couchsurfing website from some friends that had traveled through South America, so before bed I logged in and was lucky enough to find a good host for the next night.